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For 40 years, nothing worked. Promoters enticed the four aging musicians with big bucks. Fans asked. Friends encouraged. Nothing, it seemed, would get the 1960s rock band the Rascals — “Good Lovin,’” “Groovin,’” “Lonely Too Long” — to reunite.

“I was once quoted as saying, ‘We’ll get together for the Pope’s wedding,’” laughs guitarist Gene Cornish, 69. “Well, I got news for you: the Pope got married!”

The Rascals not only reunited, they’ve taken their hybrid show — live rock concert by the four original members combined with the band’s story — to Broadway in the spring and now on a North American tour. The Rascals: Once Upon a Dream will be at Toronto’s Royal Alexandra Theatre from Aug. 13 to 25.

For the Rascals, it’s sweeter the second time around.

“You see life differently when you’re older. You appreciate things more,” says drummer Dino Danelli, 68, on the phone from Boston, a tour stop. “We were really young the first time, our early 20s. It hit us like a tornado, a blur. We didn’t squeeze out all the beautiful things happening. Now we appreciate it.”

Not so saintly, Van Zandt played pompadoured mobster Silvio Dante on the Sopranos. He made the boys an offer they couldn’t refuse.

Actually, two offers. In 2010, he got Cornish, Danelli, singer Eddie Brigati and keyboardist/singer Felix Cavaliere to play a cancer benefit in New York City. Then he came up with the combined concert and biography concept, using archival footage, narration, and giant screens to tell the story of the band and the tumultuous ’60s.

“That’s what made it artistically valid for them. It wasn’t just another reunion of an oldies group,” says Van Zandt, 62, on the phone from Loch Lomond, Scotland, on tour with Bruce Springsteen.

“I felt it was important to do something big to communicate how important they were in the history of rock ’n’ roll.”

The Rascals, who started in New Jersey and were first known as The Young Rascals, thrived in the mid to late ’60s with such hits as “It’s a Beautiful Morning,” “How Can I be Sure?” and “People Got to Be Free.”

Van Zandt remembers being about 14 and with his girlfriend when he first heard “I Ain’t Gonna Eat Out My Heart Anymore.”

“It was so amazing, I stopped, you know, sort of playing around with my girlfriend. I had to listen to that song,” recalls Van Zandt. “The whole sound of the Rascals was new. They were the first blue-eyed soul group.”

The successful group split up in the early 1970s. No one seems to remember exactly why.

“Nah, even if I did remember I wouldn’t mention it,” says Cornish, who was born in Ottawa but moved to the U.S. as a child. “It was a bunch of stuff: outside forces not taking care of business.”

“There was no great falling out, no fights,” says Danelli. “It was just time to end.”

The members went their own ways, performing solo or forming new bands.

In 1997, Van Zandt inducted the Rascals into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Starting in the early 1980s, he’d broach them about a reunion every five or 10 years without luck, until the cancer benefit.

“That event made sense to all of us and the timing was right,” explains Danelli.

When they played together at the benefit, they felt the good lovin’. “We sensed that this had to go on,” says Danelli. “That it was time to do something serious together again.”

Van Zandt wrote the script for the “bio-concert” and recruited visual designer and director Marc Brickman, known for his work with Pink Floyd, Paul McCartney and Springsteen.

With their stage lighting in the ’60s, says Danelli, the band members couldn’t see the fans, now the Rascals can watch the audience watch them.

“It’s a tennis match of love,” explains Cornish. “We bounce love to them and they bounce it back. I’m not hyping or trying to sell tickets. This is fact. It comes from the heart what I’m telling you.”

Is the tour a hard slog for guys edging up to 70?

Fuhgeddaboudit. “It makes them younger, just like it makes the audience younger,” says Van Zandt. “It’s the fountain of youth.”

Apparently so. Cornish recently got engaged for the first time in his life. “I’ve promised her another 50 years,” he says.

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